A former DOGE employee has revealed that despite Elon Musk’s claims to the contrary, transparency isn’t everything at the newly established government department. And when he tried to put that philosophy into practice, he was fired.
Sahil Lavingia, the founder and CEO of Gumroad, joined DOGE because he admired Musk, despite not being a particularly big fan of President Donald Trump.
Still, Lavingia hoped he could make people’s lives better with his work at DOGE. “Obviously, like, a lot of my family would not be excited about it,” Lavingia told NPR of working at DOGE. “Most of my friends would be like, ‘What the hell are you doing?’”
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He continued, “But hopefully, I could go back and be like, well, this is what the hell I did. I shipped this code. It made people’s lives better. And hopefully, they wouldn’t stop talking to me.”
In his first couple of months, when he was assigned to the Department of Veterans Affairs, Lavingia was able to cut some contracts and do some work on the VA’s internal chatbot. Fighting fraud, Musk’s stated mission for DOGE, was another matter, however—and one that proved significantly more challenging.
One of Musk’s deputies called Lavingia’s team, asking them to look into someone who had been receiving disability payments despite being 137 years old. Lavingia investigated, only to find the recipient in the VA’s database—and that they were 75.
“I know what happened,” he explained. “As a software engineer who’s worked on software and seen data... Some software languages—like, there was a null value that then got set to 1,900 or something.”
Lavingia’s main takeaway from his time at DOGE was that many checks and balances already exist to combat the kind of fraud and waste Musk and Trump claimed to be eliminating with their new department.
“We hoped there would be more fraud,” he said. “I think we underrated how many checks... exist when you pay somebody.“
Lavingia said that the existing system already had several checks in place, including a system to make sure that a recipient has “gone to a doctor’s appointment in the last three months” to ensure that the patient is still living.
In an interview last month with Fast Company, Lavingia admitted that the government is “not as inefficient as I was expecting, to be honest. I was hoping for more easy wins.”
This would prove to be a fatal error. Despite Musk claiming to value transparency—something Lavingia thought he was demonstrating by giving that interview—breaking ranks was not allowed. Lavingia’s position with DOGE was terminated.
Later that month, Musk also left DOGE, and its future is unclear as a result. Lavingia thinks that the department is just going to “sort of fizzle out” rather than be shuttered by Trump. “You know, ends with a whimper, not a bang sort of thing,” he said.
